Well, it’s going to be a fun September here in California!! Here’s what we have on the plate:

1. The Recall. Do we vote 2nd term Governor and former Presidential aspirant Gray Davis out of office and send him home to his little-used West Hollywood condo? If we do that, are we damaging the Democratic Party? Are we damaging the State?

Assuming we do send him home, we have:

2. The Replacement. Who do we vote in to replace him? As of this afternoon, we have (in order of my perception of their electability) some major candidates…Arnold Schwartzenegger
Cruz Bustamente
Arianna Huffington
John Garamendi
Tom McClintock

Darryl Issa – the guy who funded the recall effort with $1.7 million of his own cash, just pulled out about an hour ago.

We also have

Audie Bock (ex-Green Assembly member from Oakland)
Peter Camejo (ex-Green candidate for Gov)
Larry Flynt (pornographer)
Jack Grisham (lead signer for punk band T.S.O.L.)

And last, but not least, Angelyne!!

If nothing else, it’s the full-employment-for-political-consultants month, and since some of them are my friends, I’m all for it.

As a voter, however, it’s kind of confusing.

First, I think that the recall is a Good Thing. I know it’s going to cost us money, and distract our politicians’ attention from the current set of crises. But I think that it’s a giant bucket of ice water splashed in the political establishment’s face, waking them up to the peasants with pitchforks standing outside the building howling with rage.

If you’ve read much of my stuff, you’ll know that I’m one of them. I’m tired of ‘seagull government’, I’m tired of paying taxes for programs that don’t work while ones that do get cut off and abandon people in real need, I’m tired of a government that manages to lack compassion, common sense, a sense of humility, and a sense of purpose beyond lunch and eventually getting a nice retirement paycheck … and here I’m talking about the elected officials, not the folks working at the DMV or the Welfare Department. It’s their management that makes them act the ways we don’t like, and their management that can and must change them. It’s the leaders who select that management who need to be kept accountable.

The system needs a slap in the face and a kick in the ass. It needs a lot more as well, stuff that will only come with long patient work and commitment, and the challenge will be to take that anger and turn it into fuel for the long haul ahead. But for now, we’ve got to get started someplace, and someplace feels like my local polling place in October.

I’m personally torn between the desire to have a grownup come in and clean up the mess – a Leon Panetta (Bustamente might make that level with me, I’ll have to think very hard), and someone who will come in, hang the legislators out of the window and shake them by their ankles until they see their way to more meaningful change – which would be an Arnold.

I’m going to be researching Bustamente with my friends in Sacramento. I’m disinclined to support him because supporting him dodges the larger-scale issues set out above…it doesn’t respond to change with anything except handing the job to the next guy in line for the job. But that’s not a firm position.

Panetta would be my ideal candidate – has enough political weight to have relations up and down the line, can call in friendships and favors, is smart about budget issues. He doesn’t address the ‘soft’ issues, but he probably would do the best job on the hard ones. Sadly, he isn’t in the race, and with today’s developments, is unlikely to jump in.

Ah-nold would probably be next. I’ve met him twice (once in the context of business, and once accidentally – a long time ago, pre-Terminator – in the gym, where he stopped to criticize my technique and wound up giving a half-hour seminar to fifteen people on situps), and frankly been impressed both times. He’s a smart businessman who has managed to surround himself with competent people in his chosen fields of endeavor – and that’s one of the first things I look for in judging someone. His policy mix is probably right down the middle for California – although he shoots, he’s probably pro-moderate gun regulation, pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-education. He has shown himself canny in his use of celebrity to further his goals – whether business or political – and he has the communication skills to use the bully pulpit, if he really has a message to give.

Jesse Ventura is the obvious comparison, and he turned out to be an awful governor. But…he was a commentator (a solo contributor, as opposed to a manager), and at the end of the day, he broke trail for Tim Pawlenty, who is from all accounts a damn good governor.

So it’s likely that Arnold has a better chance than Jesse to be competent (although he has the horrible disadvantages of no political relationships in Sacramento), and he may well serve the same function in breaking trail for someone better.

At this point, barring Panetta showing up by Saturday, or some news about Arnold that will shock me (a movie star who likes women!! The horror!! The horror!! Sorry, unless he’s a rapist, I can’t get upset about that…), I think I’m tipping his way.

There’s a problem…

…if he brings a GOP infrastructure with him, it will be an issue in the ’04 Presidential campaign, and if I believed it would be a close race in ’04 and that California was critical, I might waver a bit.

Lots to think about, and meanwhile, sit down, strap in, and hang on…this is definitely going to be interesting.

Via the estimable Oxblog, I discover a bunch of new-thinkers right here in Los Angeles, the ‘Hope Street Group’.

The Hope Street Group promotes principles and policies aimed at achieving an Opportunity Economy, in part by harnessing the skills, networks and resources of a new generation of business executives and professionals.

Sounds pretty good so far. They support what they call the ‘opportunity economy’, in which market incentives are created and market barriers lowered to ensure that everyone has a chance to participate. I definitely like the sound of that.

The details, however, need a bit of work.

They have several white papers available online. I’ll make one key suggestion for them; following on the excellent usability work of Jakob Nielsen, I’ll suggest that presenting multipage papers online only as pdf’s is a Bad And Annoying Thing.Let’s look at one of the papers; the paper on housing. It’s an area I know something about, having studied it in grad school, written some laws on the subject while working for the Jerry Brown administration, and worked as a consultant to developers of conventional and affordable housing (I have a couple of parallel careers, what can I say…).

Their paper is titled:

BUILDING A NATION OF HOMEOWNERS Making homes more affordable: downpayment assistance for first-time buyers

and suggests two basic policy changes:

Making homes more affordable: downpayment assistance for first-time buyers

Making homes more plentiful: a tax credit to spur affordable home construction

They propose to pay for this in large part by:

Adjusting the mortgage interest tax deduction

Limiting mortgage interest deductibility to mortgage principals below $300,000.

Although eliminating the tax deductibility of interest on mortgage principals between $300,000 and $1 million may seem drastic at first, that the reality is that only 7% of homes sell for more than $300,000, affecting just over one million homebuyers.

and

Eliminating the deductibility of interest on second/vacation home mortgages.

They admit one issue with their proposals:

“This proposal does not address local regulatory barriers or homeowner education programs, both of which make a crucial difference in promoting or hindering homeownership.”

Response: There is no question that local regulatory barriers are a major obstacle to home building and therefore to home ownership. The local control that creates these barriers must be preserved. But the local challenges facing developers make federal intervention all the more important. Because the market incentives to build affordable homes are blunted, federal incentives are crucial. Tax breaks to developers of the sort proposed here are designed to let builders get back to building.

First, and foremost, the idea of expanding homeownership – as a financial and social anchor – is one that truly can work for many people. They are right on in their diagnosis, but the prescription leaves something to be desired.

Let’s go through the points.

Downpayment assistance.

First, why? Why not revamp existing Federal mortgage programs to offer targeted insurance to homebuyers at 100% of the purchase price? The issue is that they will not have any stake in the purchase, and so you’ll see a high rate of default. My answer would be to take a Grameen Bank approach, and do two things. First, create a pool of credit that can be used but must be repaid, in conjunction with the high LTV loans. Leverage existing institutions – local churches and some nonprofits that can accept people into training programs, peer them with a small group of eight to ten others, and when they graduate, make them eligible for the loans…and responsible for each other’s performance – a key feature in Grameen Bank success stories. Have ongoing credit and homeownership training, and let them work toward either refinancing these ‘silent seconds’ out, or have them due on sale.

Second, the issue is typically the amount of overhead that goes into the government or nonprofit infrastructure in programs like this. By simply creating a new kind of FHA-insured home loan, you’ll expand the pool of capital and the existing real estate markets will make use of it; you can then layer on the added availability of ‘microcredit’ loans with a much smaller investment in infrastructure, and with a revolving pool of capital that will be, to a large extent, self-replenishing.

In addition, there is a limited pool of affordable housing in most communities – buyer subsidies will typically wind up in the hands of the sellers as the market clears with the price of homes pushed upward by the new supply of buyers.

They propose to deal with it through tax credit subsidies to for-sale housing developers, essentially extending the existing programs that have applied to rental housing. Nice for the developers, but in a marketplace with an immense demand for housing like the ones we have now, unlikely to have a significant impact.

They touch on it when they mention that local regulatory barriers are an issue.

Folks, they are the issue. Some time I will do a long post on the inherently corrupt and disastrous state of zoning practice in most of the country with which I am familiar, For now, suffice it to say that in the City of Los Angeles, it takes a minimum of eighteen months to get a significant project approved, and typically (and I’m not talking Ahmanson Ranch scale projects) takes two years.

Modest ‘affordable’ homes require high density in urban areas, and both the modest scale of the houses and the densities required mean strong local opposition as homeowners are concerned about protecting their home values from being reduced by an influx of ‘lesser’ homes.

Affordable for-sale housing (which I would generously define as costing $270,000 or less in Los Angeles) returns modest profits to the developers, as opposed to lower-density, larger, more expensive market-rate housing.

Greater difficulty, lower profits…hmmm.

They will doubtless kick off some housing development with this, and some developers who would have done projects regardless will wind up benefiting, but the overall impact in urban areas will be low.

They propose to finance these subsidies with modifications to the mortgage deductibility of ‘jumbo’ mortgages and second homes.

Now I actually agree with them; I actually floated proposals a while ago (before the mortgage interest deduction was capped at mortgages of $1,000,000) that we limit the mortgage interest deduction to 3x the national average, and that we eliminate the vacation home deduction (which is often used for Winnebagoes and boats, anyway). But the political reality is that those proposals are DOA.

Good luck, have fun storming the castle, as they say. Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only is their suggestion quixotic, but the current economy is in large part being kept afloat by high home prices combined with low-interest deductible mortgages.

These home prices are predicated on one thing – the ability to find new buyers who will pay as much or more. And if those buyers can’t deduct the mortgage interest – if they have to start paying those high prices with after-tax dollars. Well, you say, it will only impact the expensive houses, which will become less expensive. Driving down the price of the less-expensive houses, and so on ad infinitum.

Now personally, I think we have far too much of our national wealth trapped in our houses. I think we overconsume housing both in quantity and cost, and that we’d be better off as a nation (even though I’d be broke) if house prices were substantially lower relative to incomes, and if more liquid equities in productive companies were relatively a more attractive investment.

I’ll work through their other proposals in the next few days, and drop them a note and invite them to respond.

(edited to highlight quoted material)

Another good Nick Kristof column today.

I may have to rethink my opinion of him. Damn, I hate it when facts overrule prejudice.

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there’s an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, “Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?”

He then goes into the emerging history being uncovered by Japanese historians that suggests that the Bomb did in fact fracture the ruling coalition and create the possibility of surrender.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Sparkey of Team Stryker adds more historical background.

I’ve been catching up on my blog reading tonight while Tenacious G catches us up on Quickbooks, and found a few things:

First of all, sign me right up for Vanderleun’s holiday campaign:

NO CDs FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
WEB TO RIAA: TWO WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT.

I haven’t bought any new CD’s since May. Just picked up a nice used copy of “Will the Circle be Unbroken” at Amazon. No greater effort than buying a new one, and I saved a few bucks. I won’t buy any more new CD’s this year. I may not buy any next year. My life doesn’t seem to be any worse for it. Yours won’t be either.

He’s looking for someone to design a web button … click on through and help him out.

I saw this in the L.A. Times Sunday magazine (intrusive registration etc. etc. use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) and assumed other bloggers would pick it up; I’m surprised that no one’s blogged this up until now, so I’ll toss it out there. The subtitle was:

His Behavior Was Bizarre. His Peers Insulted His Muslim Faith. He Was Shipped Off to Fight in Iraq. Then He Allegedly Murdered Two Army Officers.

And a sympathetic look at the Iraqi fragger follows. It opens:

Once a month Quran Bilal drives north out of Baton Rouge, La., in her black Nissan, a car so old she cannot remember its year, only that she paid $700 for it used and that the odometer has now turned 148,000 clicks. A side window is broken and the air-conditioning blows hot.

Bilal endures it because this is the only way she can visit her son, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, her eldest, who is confined to a military brig at Ft. Knox, Ky.

…

As disturbing as the attack was, Akbar’s defense is equally troubling. His mother and his military lawyers say he snapped in the face of relentless ridicule, of him and of Muslims in general. He had complained before his arrest that soldiers and officers harassed him and scared him and trampled on his religion. Moments after his arrest, according to fellow soldiers, he blurted out that he feared ”American soldiers were going to kill and rape Muslims” once Iraq was taken.

If we expect that the U.S. military is a microcosm of society, then such harassment isn’t terribly surprising, especially after Sept. 11. But if we expect the military, with its rigorous oversight and strong need for cohesive fighting units, to have less tolerance for religious harassment and other divisive forces, then Akbar’s case may provide a painful lesson of the kind the nation has wrestled with since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and elsewhere where the killers felt they had been hazed or shunned by their peers.

There’s more…

Articles like this tend to make me want to gnaw my way through the newspaper.

The good defense attorneys – the $450/hour ones and the ones who take the high-profile pro-bono cases – have become masters of publicity, and I tend to look at articles like this as a salvo in the upcoming legal battle.

Even if not explicitly placed by the defense, they say a lot about our attitude toward crime and criminals.

The hazing is real, the murders alleged. The article stakes out a broad social critique, and then spirals down to focus on one obviously disturbed young man.

In Akbar’s case, it should be noted, harassment might have been just part of the problem. Soldiers testified at his preliminary military court proceedings this summer that he was known for strange behavior, a flaw he does not deny. At his Ft. Campbell, Ky., Army base and in the Kuwaiti desert awaiting combat in Iraq, he often seemed aloof and confused. Soldiers recalled him pacing aimlessly, talking to himself, laughing and smiling at nothing. Army superiors said he was passed over for promotions, given second and third chances to shape up and then reassigned to more mundane duties.

…

But despite these advances, his performance began to falter and his superiors began noticing odd behavior. His conduct mystified them, leaving them at a loss to explain his sudden changes. It ultimately led to his being frozen out of future promotions.

Several superiors testified at Akbar’s preliminary military court proceedings that he was late for assignments. On a training exercise to Louisiana, where he was in charge of making sure other soldiers brought their gear, officers said he forgot his duffel bag. He misplaced his dogtags. On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the base was on high alert, he showed up at the gate without his ID badge, the supervisors said.

Army officers said they found him asleep in training classes. They watched him sneak into Army vehicles and try to sleep away the afternoon. He could not keep up with physical exercise, they said, a failing for any sergeant expected to lead troops. He walked aimlessly, sometimes talking or laughing to himself.

There’s an interesting story to be done…about how an Army with a substantial number of Muslim soldiers – at war with a Muslim nation – manages the obvious conflicts of fellowship and anger. There is a story about the tragic intersection of events in the Kuwait desert that cost two lives – un-named, unremarked except as “It was kind of an ugly scene there,” said Capt. Terence Bacon, one of the wounded. “A lot of noise. A lot of screaming. A lot of blood.” A good story might have balanced the lives of the dead and the accused and made us wonder how their lives diverged.

Instead we’re treated to a story which does two things. It humanizes a man who we trained to be a killer and who may well instead have become a murderer, breaking the ground for a sympathetic defense. And it lays the blame for the incident fully on the institution, not the individual.

Actually, it does a third, which is to remind me once again how the internal bias and contradictions in the modern corporate media are so damn maddening.

There’s an interesting roundelay about blogging and politics going on at Doc Searls’ and Gerald Vanderleun‘s. The topic is the impact of blogging on politics, and the arguments are simple. Doc says:

I sense an opening here for a practical libertarian sensibility coming to the fore, from the grass roots … from the blogs. What makes this sensibility a moderating influence is the tie that it makes to sensible governance.

This country has been whipsawed for too long between those who hate big business and those who hate big government, and who have used both to pound on both, to many bad effects. The trick is to look past the sports events we call elections, to the hard and compromising work we call governance. Are we going to fix the roads? Make public transportation work? Continue opening trade? Fix health care? Can we? (It’s a legitimate question.) Should we? How? Visiting those questions with an open mind, I think, is most deeply what networked democracy is all about.

Gerald replies:

To return to the thought at the top of the file, when you’re a blog everything looks like a post. I’m not among those whose pulse starts to race when yet another pol enters the blogrolls. I don’t think it is all that significant. Why? First because it is very premature to start picking winners and losers and the reasons why. Second, because I don’t think for a moment these PoliBloggers are sincere. Reasons?

…

But hope dies hard, and when a man shows up that not only says things that make the left feel good about itself, but uses the tools of the cyberlibertarian realm in a manner that seems effective, then it is understandable that those deeply embedded in the cyberculture and Blogworld start to perceive a luminosity around a candidate that is not visible to the vast unconnected, unwired, and unconcerned multitudes.

I’m of two minds on this.

On one hand, I feel like a change in perspective is coming, and in my own shared disaffection I feel like I’m moving with a larger tide. When Doc says “The trick is to look past the sports events we call elections, to the hard and compromising work we call governance,” he’s definitely talking my language.

On the other, I think that Dean is an arguably (I know some folks in Vermont who don’t think so) good guy who is using the tools of the Internet to get some early leverage in the race. I doubt that he will be nominated, and if he is nominated, I’ll predict a McGovern-level debacle for the Democrats. I do think that the blogoverse is an echo chamber, in which fifty or one hundred conversations take place and suddenly we feel like the world is changing. Gerald is fully in the right to throw some cold water on the fantasies of the Wired Magazine crowd.

I commented a long time ago that this blogging thing is a dojo – a training and practice ground – in which I hope to develop my own political thinking so I can take it out and use it in the real world.

I’m softening a bit on that, and coming to believe that it is becoming a stream in the giant media Feed that helps define that ‘real world’; but I still hold that it’s what we do when we’re away from the keyboard that counts.

Back from a bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas, and as I try and rehydrate, I read two interesting articles in the Sunday’s L.A. Times Opinion section (annoying registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’).

The first one is a blithe commentary on the need for the ICC by Robert McNamara, still atoning. I’m working on something that sets out why I think the concept of ‘international law’ means something quite different from ‘national law’, but read his article yourself and see what you think.

The second is a thoughtful, but partisan, article on white-collar job flight by David Friedman, from the New America Foundation. His column almost exactly reflects what I believe about the state of the economy and the response of the two big parties to what we’re seeing. read the whole thing, but here are three good grafs:

News that major U.S. technology companies, among them IBM, plan to export thousands of high-skill jobs overseas indicates that worrisome trends in the U.S. economy will probably strengthen. Optimists contend that such “workforce flexibility” guarantees that something new … the Internet, biotechnology … will turn up to create similar high-paying jobs and carry the economy forward. But rather than triggering real economic development, moving white-collar jobs offshore underscores how reliant the U.S. economy has become on inflating high-end wealth and paper assets to compensate for large-scale job losses. If this pattern holds, the next boom may quickly mutate into another unsustainable bubble, further limiting America’s industrial options.

…

Today, if you’re, say, a U.S. filmmaker or an executive of a high-tech company, you can freely shift skilled and managerial-level jobs to low-wage or government-subsidized nations or hire at will from a bottomless pool of compliant workers in those countries. As a result, you can accumulate personal wealth much more rapidly. In turn, you pay far more in taxes.

This arrangement also makes private-sector employment less secure. That boosts demand for government services like job retraining and education. Tenured, benefit-rich public-sector jobs become more attractive. As wealth creation at the top is fostered, so too is the apparent need for and capacity to fund the public sector.

But it’s difficult to sustain economic growth this way. For example, during the last boom, the economic link between elite wealth and the public sector was most fully forged in New York City, Seattle and the Bay Area. For a time, housing prices soared, stock options fattened executives’ incomes and the resulting tax windfall fed public-sector expansion.

When the economy slowed, these areas were especially vulnerable. Land-use, zoning and redevelopment policies had driven out the middle and working classes, leaving behind an unbalanced economic base. Even after the economy soured, growth restraints kept property values high and public spending continued unabated, frustrating hopes for a quick turnaround.

…

Democrats have largely abandoned their New Deal, pro-industrial political legacy in favor of an elite-dominated, anti-development sensibility. The powerful public-sector unions that now dominate the party have little incentive to expand the private sector, in no small measure because they disproportionately benefit from the accumulation of massive wealth in a small number of pockets.

Across the aisle, Republican economic thinking is increasingly shaped by what political commentator Michael Lind calls “Southernomics” … a primitive commodity capitalism inspired by 19th century industries like cotton and oil production. Its adherents are unlikely to be troubled by the expansion of a concentrated, aristocratic-style wealth distribution. The party’s once vocal advocacy for entrepreneurial, egalitarian development is today rarely heard.

It may be that America’s flexible labor force is enough to stimulate an unexpected creative breakthrough, reinvent the U.S. economy, replace the nation’s dwindling supply of quality jobs and pay off the nation’s huge public deficits. But it’s just as likely that the next boom will be even more volatile and short-lived than the last one. If so, the pathologies latent in the U.S. economy may become even more entrenched and increasingly difficult to treat.

I’m not sure he’s nailed the Republican condition, but he’s absolutely right on three things:

The Democratic alliance between the high-wealth sector and the public employees, as each become more and more dependant on the other (the wealthy to the public sector to deal with the externalities they create, and the public sector on the wealthy to provide the tax revenue necessary);

The Republican policy abandonment of “entrepreneurial, egalitarian development”;

And the fact that our responses to this…as we are seeing right now in California…leave us with fewer and few policy options as the burden of public debt increases along with the fragility of the regional economic and social networks, meaning that disruptive change becomes less and less possible as we slowly drift downward to Neil Stevenson’s prosperity (‘what looks like prosperity to a Pakistani brickmaker).

Dragging their feet on arming pilots, the Administration is also moving, as an economy measure, to reduce the number of armed Air Marshals.

The Transportation Security Administration wants to reduce the number of air marshals to save money, even as the government is warning about the possibility al-Qaida may try more suicide hijackings.

The TSA is seeking approval from Congress to cut $104 million from the air marshal program to help offset a $900 million budget shortfall. It’s unclear how many of the estimated several thousand air marshal jobs would be affected.

Not to suggest that they don’t have good plan, or anything…

Tenacious G just forwarded me this email which is making the rounds in her legal circles. Snopes doesn’t disavow it, and Christy Ferer is in fact the Mayor’s liason to the 9/11 Victims’ families.

Subject: A Request From Baghdad

Christy Ferer is a 9/11 widow who recently was a member of a group of celebrities (including Robert DeNiro and Kid Rock, among others) that took an Armed Forces Entertainment Office and USO-sponsored trip to Iraq to show support for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines still over there. Following is an e-note she sent her escorts about the experience. In her cover note, she said she intends to submit it to the NY Times for publication. It is really powerful, and very moving, and will make you proud that you have chosen to serve your country, and proud to be an American. Enjoy…and thanks as always for all you do for America’s Air Force!

[s]
Brig Gen Ron Rand
———-

When I told friends about my pilgrimage to Iraq to thank the US troops, reaction was under whelming at best. Some were blunt. “Why are YOU going there?” They could not understand why it was important for me, a 9/11, widow to express my support for the men and women stationed today in the Gulf.

But the reason seemed clear to me. 200,000 troops have been sent halfway around the world to stabilize the kind of culture that breeds terrorists like those who I believe began World War III on September 11, 2001. Reaction was so politely negative that I began to doubt my role on the first USO / Tribeca Institute tour into newly occupied Iraq where, on average, a soldier a day is killed.

Besides, with Robert De Niro, Kid Rock, Rebecca and Johns Stamos, Wayne Newton, Gary Senise, and Lee Ann Wolmac who needed me?

Did they really want to hear about my husband, Neil Levin, who went to work as director of New York Port Authority on Sept.11th and never came home? How would they relate to the two other widows traveling with me? Ginny Bauer, a New Jersey homemaker and the mother of three who lost her husband, David and former marine Jon Vigiano who lost his only sons, Jon, a firefighter and Joe, a policeman.

As we were choppered over deserts that looked like bleached bread crumbs I wondered if I’d feel like a street hawker, passing out Port Authority pins and baseball caps as I said “thank you” to the troops. Would a hug from me mean anything at all in the presence of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and a Victoria Secrets model?

We arrived at the first “meet and greet”. It made me weep. (why?) Armed with M16s and saddlebags of water in 120 degree heat the soldiers swarmed over the stars for photo and autographs.

When it was announced that a trio of 9/11 family members was also in the tent it was as if a psychic cork on emotional dam was popped.

Soldiers from every corner of New York, Long Island and Queens rushed toward us to express their condolences. Some wanted to touch us, as if they needed a physical connection to our sorrow and for some living proof for why they were there. One mother of two from Montana told me she signed up because of 9/11. Dozens of others told us the same thing. One young soldier showed me his metal bracelet engraved with the name of a victim he never knew and that awful date none of us will ever forget.

In fact at every encounter with the troops a surge of reservists — firefighters and cops including many who had worked the rubble of Ground Zero — came to exchange a hometown hug. Their glassy eyes still do not allow anyone to penetrate too far inside to the place where their trauma is lodged; the trauma of a devastation far greater than anyone who hadn’t been there could even imagine. It’s there in me, too. I had forced my way downtown on that awful morning, convinced that I could find Neil beneath the rubble.

What I was not prepared for was to have soldiers show us the World Trade Center memorabilia they’d carried with them into the streets of Baghdad. Others had clearly been holding in stories of personal 9/11 tragedies which had made them enlist.

USO handlers moved us from one corner to the next so everyone could meet us.

One fire brigade plucked the 9/11 group from the crowd, transporting us to their fire house to call on those who had to stand guard during the Baghdad concert. It was all about touching us and feeling the reason they were in this hell. Back at Saddam Hussein airport Kid Rock turned a “meet and greet” into an impromptu concert in a steamy airport hangar before 5000 troops.

Capt. Vargas from the Bronx tapped me on the back . He enlisted in the Army up after some of his wife’s best friends were lost at the World Trade Center. When he glimpsed the piece of recovered metal from the Towers that I had been showing to a group of soldiers he grasped for it as if it were the Holy Grail. Then he handed it to Kid Rock who passed the precious metal through the 5000 troops in the audience. They lunged at the opportunity to touch the steel that symbolized what so many of them felt was the purpose of their mission-which puts them at risk every day in the 116 degree heat and not knowing if a sniper was going to strike at anytime.

Looking into that sea of khaki gave me chills even in that blistering heat. To me, those troops were there to avenge the murder of my husband and 3 thousand others. When I got to the microphone I told them we had not made this journey for condolences but to thank them and to tell them that the families of 9/11 think of them every day. They lifts our hearts. The crowd interrupted me with chants of ” USA, USA, USA.” Many wept.

What happened next left no doubt that the troops drew inspiration from our tragedies. When I was first asked to speak to thousands of troops in Quatar, after Iraq, I wondered if it would feel like a “grief for sale” spectacle.

But this time I was quaking because I was to present the recovered WTC recovered steel to General Tommy Franks. I quivered as I handed him the icy gray block of steel. His great craggy eyes welled up with tears. The sea of khaki fell silent. Then the proud four-star general was unable to hold back the tears which streamed down his face on center stage before 4,000 troops. As this mighty man turned from the spotlight to regain his composure I comforted him with a hug.

Now, when do I return?

Check out Groklaw, a weblog that seems most focussed on the business and legal issues underlaying current SCO-storm in the open-source world. I have a feeling that the outcome of these cases is going to be damn important in the next decades.

UPDATE: See comments.